During a regular-scheduled meeting on Thursday night, the Plainview ISD school board voted to approve the building of a private LTE wireless service around the school district.
The project was first brought to the board in August and formally presented by Superintendent H.T. Sanchez and Brent Richburg, the district’s chief technology officer.
Richburg — who was busy during the meeting as most of it centered around conversations of technology purchases — and Sanchez said that the project would give students without Internet access at home the opportunity to connect to the school’s dedicated wireless service through a series of data towers.
The towers will be built in five different locations around the school district. Plainview High School and Coronado Middle School will each have three towers built around those locations. Two will be built around the PISD Technology Tower and the new Seth Ward Water District tower and one will go to the new site of Thunderbird Elementary.
Sanchez said the tower locations were chosen based on student population density. The network will be exclusive to PISD with students and faculty needing their school login credentials to access it.
Total cost of the project is expected to be around $1.1 million with Netsync Network Solution. Funding for the project will come from local funding, including Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) II Funds and COVID Relief Funds.
Each of the towers will have a radius of about 3/4th of a mile. Sanchez urged the board to approve the project, saying that it doesn’t do the district any good to give students technology to better their education if many of them can’t use it outside of school.
The board voted 7-0 to approve the project. Veronica Salazar was absent from the meeting.
The board also approved a number of technology purchases, including 570 mini computers ($433,200), 50 Microsoft Surface laptops for faculty and staff ($70,000), Interactive Flat Panels for classrooms ($1,204,100 for 350 boards) and 350 iPads ($120,330).
Also on the budget was approving a new facility rental handbook for the school athletic and meeting areas. These were brought to the board due to the new facilities currently being built (the new middle and elementary schools), being revamped (the softball field) or the ones soon-to-be-built in the very near future (the new baseball field behind Greg Sherwood Memorial Bulldog Stadium).
For-profit entities and non-profits call for different rental price points. For example, a for-profit entity wanting to rent the football stadium would pay a $2,000 fee with lighting and a $1,500 fee without. For non-profits, those numbers are $1,500 and $1,000, respectively.
The rental agreements also involve security being provided by the PISD Police Department, plus rates for custodial services.
Students that are attending 4-H events will now be able to be counted present for school. PISD board members voted to approve an agreement with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Services for Hale County. Previously, students received an excused absence for missing school. Now, those students will be credited as being in school as they will be considered educational events, similar to the school’s FFA organization.
The board also approved a student’s request to replace their physical education class with outside course work at the Lone Star Ballet Company. Sanchez noted that it’s unusual for a student to request it, but it’s not something the district discourages or limits, it’s just rare a student chooses that route.
Underwood Legal Services has been approved to handle redistricting for PISD. The redistricting impacts what areas the seven board members represent and is done after each census, the most recent of which was completed this year.
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